Further Reading

There were many curious moments in last week's Ham-on-Nye debate about creationism—any debate where one side is fundamentally divorced from the reality of deep time will necessarily produce those—but one of them struck at the very nature of science itself. Rather than a single, unified approach to doing science, Ken Ham argued that there were two approaches: the lab-coated science of controlled experiments, and what he terms "historic science." Ham dismissed Nye's arguments by calling him "the historic science guy" and trotted out a number of scientists who claimed that they could successfully go about their work while convinced that the Earth was less than 7,000 years old.

Nye did his best to parry this argument, pointing out that we seem to happily accept a scientific approach to the past when it's in the form of forensic science, and pointing out that because of the vast distances involved in our Universe, light takes long enough to get here that pretty much everything we see happened in the distant past.

But this line of argument deserves more than the quick rebuttal that the debate format allows. Almost all science is fundamentally a reconstruction of the past—the only difference is how far into the past the reconstruction reaches. To argue otherwise betrays an equally fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of experimentation.

There’s no escaping the past

The first response to this claim, even from supporters of mainstream science, is likely to be that experiments take place in the present, whether they're in the molecular biology lab, an NMR machine, or the Large Hadron Collider. But it's not the actual experiments that are taking place in the present tense; it's the data gathering. The actual experiments took place in the past, and the data is used in an attempt to reconstruct that past.

Take a plate full of bacterial colonies: it's possible to read it in a way that tells you something about the current status of the bacteria. But that state is used to work back toward the conditions that prevailed as those colonies were growing. Did they grow quickly or slowly? Did they metabolize a specific chemical while they were growing? The current state of a petri dish is little more than a window into the history of an entire bacterial population. In the same way, an NMR reading is little more than a reading of the current state of a batch of chemicals; it's only by using that reading to understand the chemical reactions that produced the current state that we can learn anything about the mechanisms involved in the reaction itself.

What about the LHC? Surely the fundamentals of physics act instantaneously? Well, maybe. But what we read in the LHC's detectors is the relatively stable debris—photons, muons, and electrons—that come flying out of a collision. The real action goes on among exotic heavy particles that can't even move far enough to reach the detector hardware before decaying. The things that do hit the detectors are used to reconstruct the events that produced them, as researchers work backward in space and time to reach the collision's moments of creation. It's historic science, just an incredibly brief history.

There are probably some rare exceptions to this idea; changes in voltage can probably be read nearly instantaneously and act as an instant readout of a very specific event. But the point is that they're the exception; most of the science we think about as taking place in the present tense involves reconstructing the past.

The present is the past

Further Reading

Presumably, Ham actually tolerates a certain degree of more obviously historical science, as well; I've not heard him railing against geologists who attempt to reconstruct a recent earthquake or volcanic eruption. But there's some unspecified point in the past (the Flood) beyond which he feels these sorts of inquiries must be invalid. During the debate with Nye, he argued that we simply can't assume that the natural laws we've identified as governing the behavior of the current Universe extended indefinitely into the past.

Ham didn't bother to explain why this assumption would be problematic, but that's really irrelevant given that we don't assume that the laws extend into the indefinite past. We have evidence that they do.

For example, the hydrogen, helium, and lithium that compose the primordial gas of the Universe were formed a second after the Big Bang, and relative proportions of these elements were governed by the strong force. We know that at least that bit of physics was in place pretty early in the Universe. The Cosmic Microwave background was formed by electrons combining with protons to form hydrogen atoms, which tells us that quantum mechanics and electromagnetism kicked in pretty early, too.

You can travel all through the Universe's timeline, finding scientific laws working in the distant past. As soon as we could possibly observe gravity pulling matter into galaxies, the galaxies were there. Every supernova we see anywhere in the Universe is followed by pulses of brightening, caused by the decay of specific elements, meaning the weak force has been a constant. The oldest rocks on Earth show signs of geochemical processes we can detect today. Almost as soon as there were fossil animals, there were signs of relationships forged by common descent.

In other words, there's absolutely no need to assume anything when it comes to natural laws in the past. We can simply look at the evidence.

Of course, to Ham, none of this past exists. In place of things like the speed of light and redshifts, which tell us the age of various events, he'd substitute in an undescribed and probably indescribable collection of miracles. Which is strange because he probably wouldn't suggest that as a possible explanation for anything strange that grew out of a culture dish or popped out of a collision at the LHC. And I'm pretty certain that none of the scientists Ham trotted out in his videos would, either.

Selective reasoning, limited scope

The sort of selective reasoning—miracles don't happen when there's lab equipment nearby, but they have made anything more than a few centuries old completely inaccessible to scientific analysis—quite reasonably raises questions about whether researchers who hold this view can be relied on to do solid science, as does their lack of self-awareness that keeps them from recognizing that they are doing historical science. Their apparent willingness to throw the scientific method under the bus as soon as it conflicts with their personal beliefs is concerning as well. (This is especially ironic given that the scientific method exists specifically because we know that researchers are biased by their beliefs.)

That said, it's probably safe to assume that these researchers can probably safely measure changes in voltage or successfully measure the strength of the interactions between proteins and even interpret them in light of a number of the current scientific theories.

But that's a rather lame form of science. All the interesting questions in science get answered by taking narrow results and comparing them to the wider Universe. Does a set of proteins interact in related organisms? What about more distant relatives? Do they even exist in, say, plants? Do the particles we study in our accelerators tell us anything about how matter came to dominate antimatter after the Big Bang? More generally, good scientists step back and ask whether their results make sense with what we know about the Universe as a whole. (And they get very excited if the results don't make sense.)

Enlarge/ "Present changes are too small and too slow to explain these differences, suggesting God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly."

Eric Bangeman

The researchers highlighted by Ham can't even ask these sorts of questions because most of the Universe they'd compare their results to doesn't even exist. The light that's been traveling here from distant stars for millions of years? We can't know for certain, because there hasn't been millions of years. The Cosmic Microwave Background? Who knows how that got here. Evolution? Well, there are these barriers between "kinds" that we can't define, but evolution happens impossibly rapidly within kinds—or it did until recently, since it seems to have slowed down now. We think. Or something.

So yes, these researchers can do some sort of science-with-training-wheels. Just don't ever ask them to put the science in a broader context.

Incoherent and hypocritical

This attempt to divide science in two—historic and "observed"—combined with the attempts to effectively erase the past and limit the sorts of questions that scientists can ask, results in a completely incoherent mess. And that's about what you'd expect if you try to shoehorn the Universe into a 6,000-year timeline. It's a bit annoying that Ham has successfully convinced a number of people that his flawed view of the nature of experimental science is accurate, but the Teach the Controversy collection makes it clear that it's possible to convince some people of just about anything.

The real problem with Ham's argument is that it's so blatantly hypocritical. Historic science is actually fine with him—but only when it gives him an answer that can be crammed into his version of the biblical timeline. In the debate, he happily cited a study that showed all domesticated dogs shared a common ancestor—he thinks that's evidence for a dog-kind—but neglected to mention that the study also showed that the ancestor lived over 11,000 years ago. For those keeping track, that means dogs predate Ham's creation.

For biblical reasons, he likes the idea of Pangea, but he doesn't like the fact that the continents are currently moving annoyingly slowly—far too slowly to have broken up Pangea in the 2,500 or so years since the Flood. His website proudly suggests that there might have been a period of catastrophic plate tectonics where the continents raced around the globe.

The reality is that the "historic science" Ham mistakenly sets up is actually fine—but only if it tells him what he wants to believe. Which is little more than the antithesis of the scientific process.